Anibal Cavaco Silva

Anibal Cavaco Silva (15 July 1939-) was Prime Minister of Portugal from 6 November 1985 to 28 October 1995, succeeding Mario Soares and preceding Antonio Guterres, and President of Portugal from 9 March 2006 to 9 March 2016, succeeding Jorge Sampaio and preceding Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa. He was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Portugal.

Biography
Anibal Cavaco Silva was born in Boliqueime, Portugal on 15 July 1939, and he studied economics at the Universities of Lisbon and York, where he received a doctorate. He joined the Social Democratic Party of Portugal in 1974, and he became Minister of Finance in 1980 before leading his party to an election victory in 1985, heading a minority government. In 1987, he was elected with an absolute majority of votes (50.2%), for the first time in Portuguese history. He repeated this achievement in 1991, when he was re-elected with 50.4% of the popular vote. His government produced a crucial stability in a system which had seen more than ten changes of government in as many years, and helped the republic to settle down to an essentially two-party system, dominated by a party for the center-right and one for the center-left. In 1995, he lost the elections against a revitalized Socialist Party of Portugal. Unable to halt the growing enthusiasm for socialism after ten years of conservative rule, he lost the presidential elections of 1996 to Jorge Sampaio. He won the 2006 presidential election and was re-elected in 2011, and he became the most unpopular president since the abolition of the Estado Novo in 2014. His party lost re-election in 2016.